3 Comments

What a thoughtful and well written piece!

AI has massive opportunities to help radically improve the design process for semiconductors. Many of the Integrated Circuit designers are looking for new tools to improve design productivity and simulation time with AI.

One question though is why you believe LLMs can be applied to Chip design? Is this the idea that designers can use natural language to set chip parameters rather than HDL?

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Thanks Eric for the kind note! To be honest, I'm not sure if LLMs can be applied. I'm more specifically looking at solutions where some branch of AI can be applied for this specific use case (i.e Reinforcement Learning). As for VHDL, it only allows engineers to describe the behavior and structure of the microchips. It serves as a means of modeling and simulating the intended design rather than doing the actual 'design work' itself. VHDL is only introduced post-design.

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Gotcha! I misunderstood your opening paragraph.

This point does spark my curiosity though.

My hypothesis - LLMs could be used as a co-pilot to allow the IC design to annotate designs with natural language rather than VHDL or DSLs while still being interoperable with verification, simulation, and modelling software. Massive gains here to speed up documentation and communication during design.

Also potentially reduces the programming requirements for IC designers, could help reduce barriers & onboarding as there is a labour shortage (especially in Analog).

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